Page images
PDF
EPUB

May I be allowed to conjecture farther, that the Sanscrit was not formed in consequence of any deep and systematical design, but began in a sort of slang, or Gypsey jargon, (a sort of kitchen-Greek,) in which the priests conversed with one another on topics not fit for profane ears? The convenience they experienced in the use of this, would naturally suggest the employment of it in their written communications, and would gradually lead to its cultivation on grammatical principles.

Nor let the initiated few into the mysteries of this so much vaunted language indignantly reject the foregoing hypothesis, from an idea that it tends to throw an air of ridicule over its origin. My own impression is completely the reverse. For is it not a nobler pedigree to be traced to an oral cipher (if I may use the expression) invented by the Gymnosophists of India, than to claim a descent from the gabble of some savage horde; or, as is the case with some of the most polished languages of modern Europe, to the intercourse produced by conquest between Roman soldiers and Gothic barbarians! Is not the mode in which I have supposed Sanscrit to be formed, (considering the materials which entered into its composition,) incomparably more likely to have given rise to a regular and refined language, than the combination of accidents which has given birth to every other tongue spoken upon earth!

It is by no means improbable that this conjecture, as well as the various others which my predecessors have offered with respect to the Sanscrit, may be no less wide of the truth, than the speculations which I have ascribed to the Roman scholar concerning the Polemo-Middinia. But of these conjectures there are some which we may, I think, confidently reject, from the absolute impossibility of the suppositions they involve; and in this way we may, perhaps, in time, gain a few steps towards the truth, by following what mathematicians call the method of exclusions.

Latin and English to be connected in the following period :-'The true lex is recta ratio, conformable naturæ, which by commanding vocet ad officium,

by forbidding a fraude deterreat.””—__ Works of Sir William Jones, vol. ii. pp. 131, 132.

Of the conjectures here alluded to, that which seems most generally sanctioned among Oriental scholars, seems to me the most manifestly untenable. According to this, we are led to suppose that the Sanscrit was, at some former period, spoken over a great part of the East, and that it still forms the basis of all the various dialects which exist there at this day.

"The grand source of Indian Literature,” says Mr. Halhed, "the parent of almost every dialect from the Persian Gulf to the China Seas, is the Shanscrit, a language of the most venerable and unfathomable antiquity, which, although at present shut up in the libraries of the Bramins, and appropriated solely to the records of their religion, appears to have been current over most part of the Oriental world; and traces of its original extent may still be discovered in almost every district of Asia."1

Mr. Colebrooke is equally decisive, and still more precise in his statement. "The Sanscrit,” he tells us, "evidently draws its origin from a primæval tongue, which was gradually refined in various climates, and became Sanscrit in India, Pahlavi in Persia, and Greek on the shores of the Mediterranean.

[ocr errors]

It is now become almost a dead language; but there seems no good reason for doubting that it was once universally spoken in India."2

It were to be wished that the very ingenious writer had explained in what manner he conceived this primæval tongue to have become Sanscrit in one country, Pahlavi in a second, and Greek in a third. Certainly, if it bore any resemblance to the progress by which the Latin language became Italian in Italy, Spanish in Spain, and French in France, the effect in the Eastern world exhibits a most wonderful contrast to what has taken place in modern Europe; for while the different Romanic tongues all display the most unequivocal marks of their common origin, in the numberless words which may be traced obviously to Latin roots, the syntax of all of them (including under this

Preface to Halhed's Grammar of

the Bengal Language.

2 On the Sanscrit and Pracrit Lan

guages, by Mr. Colebrooke.-Asiatic Researches, vol. vii. p. 201.

title the various inflections of nouns and verbs) has undergone a total alteration. How essentially different from that affinity and analogy described by Mr. Brown between the Sanscrit and the Greek;1 or exhibited in the resemblance of the inflections of the verbs in these two languages, in the passage already referred to from Bopp!2 From all the accounts that have fallen in my way, I am led to suspect, that the number of Sanscrit words which can be traced to a Greek root, bears no proportion to that of the words which, in the Romanic tongues, are evidently of Latin origin. Upon the hypothesis which I have proposed, all this is not only explicable, but must necessarily have happened.

It was upon these grounds that I remarked, in a former publication, that "the affinities and filiations of different tongues, as evinced in their corresponding roots and other coincidences, are incomparably more easy in the explanation, than the systematical analogy which is said to exist between the Sanscrit and the Greek in the conjugations and flexions of their verbs, and in many other particulars of their mechanism."3

If such a scholar as Dr. Bentley or Dr. Parr should ever make a serious object of studying Sanscrit, he would be able, I should think, without much difficulty, to ascertain, from internal evidence, which of the two languages was the primitive, and which the derivative dialect. He would also be enabled to decide, whether the mechanism of the Sanscrit affords any satisfactory evidence of its being manufactured by such a deliberate and systematical process as I have conjectured. It seems to be in this way alone that these points can be settled beyond controversy.

To all this we may add, that it appears difficult, if not impossible, to conceive how a tongue which was once spoken over regions of such vast extent, should have ceased to be a living language. It is by means of the most overwhelming and un

See page 79 of this volume.

"See Edinburgh Review, vol. xxxiii. p. 431. G. Mid. Voice, σεβομαι, σεβεσαι, σεβεται, σεβομεία, σέβεσθε, σεβονται. Sanscrit Mid. Voice, Sebe, sebase, sebate, sebamahe, sebadhva, sebante. The root

Seb has the same signification in Greek and in Sanscrit."

Dissertation prefixed to the Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica, [supra, Works, vol. i. p. 426.]

sparing foreign conquests, that languages have been generally changed or destroyed; and that no causes of this sort have operated in the countries where Sanscrit is alleged to have once prevailed, is demonstrated by the religious and political institutions, (more especially by the division of people into castes,) which remain unaltered in the very same countries, from the most remote periods of authentic history.1 It seems at least

1 "The conquest of Hindustan, effected by the Mahomedan nations," says Mr. Mill, "was to no extraordinary degree sanguinary or destructive. It substituted sovereigns of one race to sovereigns of another, and mixed with the old inhabitants a small proportion of new; but it altered not the texture of society; it altered not the language of the country; the original inhabitants remained the occupants of the soil; they continued to be governed by their own laws and institutions; nay, the whole detail of administration, with the exception of the army, and a few of the more prominent situations, remained invariably in the hands of the native magistrates and officers. The few occasions of persecution to which, under the reigns of one or two bigoted sovereigns, they were subjected on the score of religion, were too short and too partial to produce any considerable effects."-Mill's History of British India, vol. i. pp. 437,

438.

According to Major Rennel, (a very high authority, unquestionably, on all matters connected with Indian Geography and Indian History,) "the Sanscrit was the language of ancient Hindostan, but ceased to be the vernacular tongue soon after the Mahomedan conquest in the eleventh century."-Rennel's Memoir of a Map of Hindostan, p. 20, Introduction. I should like to know upon what evidence this assertion rests. Mr. Halhed tells us, that "the Hindostanee or Indian language appears to have been spoken for many ages through all proper

Hindostan."-Preface to his Grammar of the Bengal Language, p. 9. Sir William Jones, on the other hand, while he expresses no doubt of Sanscrit's having been once a living language, (without being able, however, to say when or where,) appears to me to have thought that IT WAS NEVER, AT ANY PERIOD, THE

VULGAR OR VERNACULAR SPEECH OF

INDIA. But that I may not be accused of imputing to him opinions which he has not explicitly avowed, I shall quote his words:

"It is much to be lamented, that neither the Greeks who attended Alexander into India, nor those who were long connected with it under the Bactrian Princes, have left us any means of knowing, with accuracy, what vernacular languages they found on their arrival in this empire. The Mahommedans, we know, heard the people of proper Hindostan, or India on a limited scale, speaking a Bháshá, or living tongue of a very singular construction, the purest dialect of which was current in the districts round Agra, and chiefly on the poetical ground of Mat'hurà; and this is commonly called the idiom of Vraja. Five words in six, perhaps, of this language, were derived from the Sanscrit, in which books of religion and science were composed, and which appears to have been formed by an exquisite grammatical arrangement, as the name itself implies, from some unpolished idiom; but the basis of the Hindustánì, particularly the inflexions and regimens of verbs, differed as widely

equally inconceivable how a language, so very perfect, should have grown up, contrary to the analogy of every one else known, from popular and casual modes of speech.

The same objection seems to me to apply with still greater force to an hypothesis proposed in the Edinburgh Review, by a gentleman whose authority is deservedly high in all matters connected with Indian Literature. In the opinion of this writer, "it is no improbable hypothesis, that the Bramins entered India as conquerors, bringing with them their language, religion, and civil institutions. The Purana,"1 continues the same writer," seem even to point out the conqueror in the person of Parusaramo, who, at the head of an army of Bramins, extirpated the military tribes, and overthrew all the existing monarchies. But the period of this event is before the æra of historical record."2

"Whatever be its antiquity," says Sir William Jones, "it is of a wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both

from both those tongues, as Arabic differs from Persian, or German from Greek. Now, the general effect of conquest is to leave the current language of the conquered people unchanged, or very little altered in its ground-work, but to blend with it a considerable number of exotic names, both for things and for actions; as it has happened in every country that I can recollect, where the conquerors have not preserved their own tongue unmixed with that of the natives, like the Turks in Greece, and the Saxons in Britain; and this analogy might induce us to believe, that the pure Hindì, whether of Tartarean or Chaldean origin, was primæval in Upper India, into which the Sanscrit was introduced by conquerors from other kingdoms in some very remote age; for we cannot doubt, that the language of the Védas was used in the great extent of country which has before been delineated, as long as the

religion of Brahma has prevailed in it." -Asiatic Researches, vol. i. pp. 421,

422.

1 According to Mr. Bentley, the Purana, in point of antiquity, are not older than 700 years; and Mr. Pinkerton thinks he has been successful in demonstrating his assertion.-See his Geography, vol. i. p. 718.

2 Edinburgh Review, vol. xiii. p. 369.

After all, is it not possible that the excellencies of Sanscrit may be somewhat overrated by Sir William Jones, from the same bias which has led him to overrate so immensely the merits of those ancient compositions, of which he has enabled the public to judge by the translations with which he has favoured us from that language? Mr. Mill has justly observed, that "languages, on which equal eulogies are bestowed to any which can be lavished on Sanscrit, are the languages confessedly of igno

« PreviousContinue »